THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE
inherited as the capacity to create wealth. I know
one family in which in a hundred and fifty years
not a single member has saved up five hundred dol-
lars. They lived all that time among associates who
created and saved thousands, even millions. The
second difficulty is that such people reproduce as
freely as their more highly endowed neighbors.
And third, there is no correlation between fertility;
and intelligence or any other feature of spiritual
excellence. By this I mean that stupid people beget
children as freely as bright people. The latter take
care of their children better and rear more to ma-
turity. For that reason, if you let things alone, the
superiors will, in the long run, outbreed the infer-
iors. But there is always enough of the latter left
to make a serious problem. A problem which you
"solve" by merely making it greater and more dif-
ficult.
It is said that Daniel "Webster, when called upon
to pay a bill, would give a promissory note for it
with the satisfying remark, "Well, thank Grod! that
bilPs paid.7' You are following the same plan of
circular finance. You are trying to pay your over-*
due bills to evolution with promissory notes.
Any man who intelligently examines his tax sched-
ule and discovers that in many states from one-
fourth to one-third of it goes to take care of de-
fectives and the socially inadequate must realize
that these promissory notes are rapidly falling due.
Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, of the Eugenics Record
Office of the Carnegie Institution, in an admirable